The Language of Trees

by Steve Wiegenstein

  “So you are one of those ‘New Birth’ churches?” Bridges asked, to change the subject.

  “We are indeed, sir,” Braswell said, and the glint in his eyes made Bridges immediately regret asking. “But that whole ‘born again’ notion barely scratches the surface. Most people fix on one thing, one phrase, and declare that makes them Christian to the exclusion of everyone else. We preach the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible, from ‘In the beginning’ to ‘Amen.’ Many a man will take a little nibble of the Bible, here and there, but few have the fortitude to swallow it whole. For example—”

  “I’m going to stop you right there,” Bridges said. “I enjoy a theological discussion as much as the next man, but I have a mill to run. Another time, and best of luck to you on your new helper.”

  “Anything will be better than what we’re doing now,” said Mattie with a groan. “Endless palaver over who should do what, and nothing gets done.”

  “Yes,” Rose Rain chimed in. “And better yet, now Lily Breeze will have to stop carrying on about how she’s the youngest and prettiest.”

  “Youngest, maybe,” Lily Breeze said. “This girl could be as ugly as a mud fence. She could be as ugly as you!”

  Braswell turned around to face them. “Ladies! A soft answer turneth away wrath.” They lowered their eyes and said no more, but as he turned to leave, Bridges noticed Rose Rain reach over and give Lily Breeze a bruising pinch on her arm. She flared but did not cry out.

  A few wagons farther down the line were the two brothers, Newton and Adam Turner. Adam held the reins, an uncomfortable expression on his face, while Newton stared ahead stoically. “You’re an unusual pair here,” Bridges said as he greeted them. “But it’s good to see you in any event.”

  “This was my idea,” Adam said. “Newton is just here to keep me company.”

  “Good to see you both,” said Bridges. “Stop up at my house for some coffee before you head back. It’s a cold day.”

  Adam seemed eager to explain further. “My wife and I have not yet been blessed with children,” he said. “So we thought—a young farmhand—not that we’d necessarily adopt him—but just to see—” He waved his hand in the air as if that would explain everything.

  “And what’s your job?” Bridges said to Newton. “Hogtie the boy if he tries to get back on the train?” Newton looked at him bleakly, and Bridges feared he had missed the joke.

  “Farm work’s better than the slum life,” Newton said. But the sour look he directed toward Adam told Bridges that he had touched a nerve. “But if it’s orphans we’re looking for, I’d think there are plenty around here to choose from without ordering off for one.”

  “We’re not ‘ordering off!’” Adam retorted. “What’s wrong with wanting to help a child ?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” Newton said. “I apologize for the remark. Mr. Bridges, how’s your silver mine doing? Making everyone rich?”

  Now it was Adam’s turn to cast a sharp look at his brother. Bridges had heard that he was an amateur digger, like half the men in the county. “Hardly,” Bridges said. “We keep at it, though.”

  In truth, the mine’s production had dropped off dramatically, although Bridges wasn’t about to admit that to these Daybreak boys. The veins had narrowed, and each wagonload of ore that came out had a little less silver and a little more waste rock. He’d been sending Dr. Kessler farther afield in search of another vein, but so far his efforts had been fruitless. Worst of all, his lighting scheme had proved unworkable. The men kept shorting it out with their tools, and even when the lights were working they didn’t always illuminate the right places. He’d scrapped it all and sent them back to their little carbide lights, which the miners preferred anyway. And his prized magneto, disconnected from its wires, too heavy to remove without great expense, sat uselessly in its mounts around the mill shaft and fed power into the ground.

  “We’d still like to buy your timberland,” he told the men. “I know the land up above you looks like hell right now, but wait till spring. I’m confident it will all green up.”

  “Hope so,” Newton said, a little gloomy. “I’d hate to see all that hilltop wash into the river when the rains come.”

  “Did your committee ever take a vote?”

  The Turner brothers eyed each other uneasily, and Bridges knew he was prying. Josephine dodged the subject whenever he tried to edge toward it, so he had stopped asking. But finally Newton spoke. “No. After the business with the dam, we dropped it.”

  Bridges filed that knowledge away for future use. So the sale had not been voted down, just not brought up. He smiled to himself. In the absence of a firm rejection, there was always room for optimism.

  “Well, you know where we stand,” he said, turning to leave. “We’d be glad to do business with you. Give my regards to your mother.”

  The look of dismay that passed over both men’s faces made him stop. “Is your mother well?” he asked.

  The men exchanged nervous glances. “She seems well enough,” Adam ventured. “But she’s been acting a bit unusual.”

  “I think she’s entering her second childhood,” Newton snapped. “That’s what I think.”

  “That hardly seems possible,” Bridges said. “When I saw her, she was firmly in command of herself.”

  “Let me ask you this,” said Newton. “You know a Mrs. Bone, in Annapolis?”

  “I do,” Bridges said. “Widow lady, runs a boarding house. Why?”

  “For three Sundays so far this year, our mother has saddled up a riding mare and gone over to Mrs. Bone’s for lunch. No explanation, just saddles up and rides off. I wouldn’t have known where she was going if I hadn’t asked her directly. You tell me if that’s normal, to ride five miles over hill and dale just to eat lunch. And her a fine cook with a well-stocked larder.”

  “Maybe she’s lonesome,” Bridges said.

  Newton snorted. “And on a cold day, too! All bundled up like a Christmas present. You think Mrs. Bone makes that good a Sunday dinner, to ride half a day to eat it? She’s losing her wits is what I think.”

  “How about you?” Bridges asked Adam.

  “I asked my wife,” he said with a shrug. “She just said every woman’s got a right to a few secrets.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Bridges said. “And don’t forget, widow ladies like to get together and gossip. Neither of you looks like much of a chatter.”

  Newton looked dubious, but the distant sound of the train whistle stopped their conversation. Adam checked the paper in his hand.

  “All right. Let’s see what Anton Kaminski has to say for himself.”

  The train wasn’t much to look at—just three passenger cars behind a coal-fired locomotive that had seen better days, and a caboose with the paint almost entirely peeled off leaving only a few dingy red patches on the naked wood. At each window, small faces peered out, some frightened, most cautiously blank.

  The engineer and fireman were men Bridges had seen before on the line, freight haulers, burly men with black hair and thick mustaches, nearly identical at first glance except that the fireman’s face was blackened with soot while the engineer’s face was sunburned. “Quite a cargo you’ve got here,” he called up to them.

  “Ain’t that the truth,” said the engineer, leaning out. “Come all the way from Chicago.”

  “How far do you have to go?”

  “Texarkana. There’s a bigger train a couple of days behind us going farther south and west. No end to the children they want to ship out of there, I guess.”

  At the door of each car stood a man and a woman with ledger books in their hands. “I tell you what,” the fireman said. “This load of kids has been about the easiest set of passengers we ever had. Them Children’s Aid people keep ’em in line.”

  Bridges hadn’t thought about it, but at the fireman’s remark he realized that the trainload of children had sat silent ever since it had pulled to a stop. “Pretty stern, eh?” he said.

  �
�The ladies is tougher than the men,” the fireman said. “Temperance and discipline all the way. We’ve had to keep our cards hid, back in the caboose.”

  “Along with a few other things,” added the engineer. He had been looking toward the back of the train while they talked. “Excuse me for a minute. Otis, hand me that poker, will you?” The fireman handed him his ash poker, and he hopped down from the cab on the other side of the train. He walked briskly toward the rear.

  “This should be good,” the fireman said. “Take a look.”

  Bridges climbed into the cab and peered out the far window, his head behind the fireman’s. The engineer headed for one of the millhands, a scrawny, red-haired young man who was leaning against the siding switch gawking at the orphan train. When he saw the engineer coming toward him with the poker in his hand, he dashed up the track like a rabbit.

  “You’d better run, you little son of a bitch!” the engineer hollered. “Standing there by an open switch like a goddamn Christmas decoration!” The millhand did not slow down or turn around to argue. When he reached the switch, the engineer yanked it shut and strode back to the cab, ignoring the profanity-induced glares of the Christian Aid women.

  The engineer climbed into the cab and returned the poker to its hook. “I think your cussing offended all them ladies,” the fireman said dryly.

  “Hmph,” said the engineer. “Wait till a freight train comes through that open switch and scatters us all over the valley. I’ll show you offended.” He checked a slip of paper in his pocket. “Everyone off that’s getting off?”

  Bridges looked down the line and saw the women with their ledger books hurrying back toward the train, leaving bewildered children behind with total strangers. The engineer pulled a cord and the whistle gave a short blast. Somewhere down the line, a voice shouted, “All Aboard!”

  The engineer turned to the fireman. “All right, next stop Des Arc. Fire us up, Otis.”

  Bridges stepped down, his boots crunching on gravel, and within a few seconds the train had gathered steam, whistled again, and gone, leaving the men and women amid the clustered wagons to gather their children and depart. Anton Kaminski had squeezed between Newton and Adam Turner on the front seat of their wagon, a shaven-headed, jug-eared boy of ten, wrapped in a wool overcoat big enough for a full-grown man, with a cloth suitcase tossed in the back containing all his possessions. Not the worst fate for a boy in his condition, Bridges supposed, though the farm work would be hard. Better his life than that of the girl, a few years older, who sat stiffly in the back of Bras-well’s wagon beside the bickering Jessup sisters. She was blonde and thin, and although Bridges couldn’t tell for sure from a distance, Lily Breeze’s claim on being the prettiest didn’t appear to be in danger.

  The rest of the day was anticlimactic, and when it ended with the rapid drop of the sun, as always on these brief winter evenings, Bridges returned home and tried to read more in his Schoolcraft. Though it was a brief book, he never seemed able to get through more than a page or two before he dropped off to sleep. He lifted the silk ribbon that he used to mark his spot and turned up the knob on his lamp. Now here was a place that could use some electric light.

  In manners, morals, customs, dress, contempt of labour and hospitality, the state of society is not essentially different from that which exists among the savages. Schools, religion, and learning are alike unknown.

  And then in a moment he was asleep.

  Chapter 12

  Sarah Wickman had loved Newton Turner for as long as she could remember. As children she and Penelope had teased each other about which of them would marry which of the Turner boys—Newton older, diligent, driven; Adam the dreamy one, too sensitive for his own good. And by ten they had determined that Penelope’s wry wit and good humor would make her the perfect tether to keep Adam connected to the ground, while Sarah had the energy and determination that paired her with Newton as the future leaders of the community, like matched horses in a team. And yet here they were, rounding their twenties, and only Penelope had made her match, living in what looked like marital bliss with her sylvan scribbler or whatever he was calling himself these days, while Sarah plodded toward spinsterhood, caring for Papa and waiting for Newton to pick up the clue that she was his meant-to-be. She’d done everything but fling herself at him in the street, and yet he gave no sign that he returned her feelings or even noticed. Any other suitors—as if there had been any—had drifted away and paired with someone else. Not that Sarah wanted any other suitors. She wanted Newton Turner, who didn’t want her, and so she was a fool. Maybe Papa wasn’t the one getting soft in the head.

  Papa sat in his customary chair by the window, where light to read by came in year-round, dozing with a book in his lap. The book was Travels to Daybreak, battered and long out of print, Papa’s original copy. Sarah had heard the story so many times as a child that she felt as if she had been there herself, how Papa was a young man clerking in the Baltimore shipyards, ever more uneasy at the distance between the rich men in the high offices and the workers on the docks, poorly paid and in those days even slaves, and how this book had clarified his unease and pointed the way to its remedy. Common ownership, common goals, a common fate. What an image the tale created for her! Her father and mother packing up their belongings and striking out for Missouri along with scores of like-minded people. Would she have dared such a journey at such an age, driven only by beliefs and a conviction that a better way of life was possible? Not likely. The modern world was timid and complacent by comparison. And to think that they had not only left the only life they ever knew, but had lost two children, the older sisters she and Penelope had never known, to cholera back in the day before anyone knew what caused it. A passerby might see an old man in his dotage, snoozing in the sunlight of his favorite afternoon spot, but Sarah saw a battered hero, Don Quixote of the hills, resting from the labors of life.

  But now that he was asleep, she could slip out and visit Penelope for a little while. She missed daily talks with her sister, and now that they had the boy Anton working for them Penelope got out even less.

  Although the sunshine was bright through the window, when Sarah stepped outside the March air cut through her wrap. She drew it tighter. “Cuss this chill,” she murmured.

  “Cuss it indeed,” said a voice behind her.

  Sarah turned in surprise. It was Dathan, on a rare trip across the river, a rake over his shoulder, on his way to tend the old slave cemetery.

  “Just like Ulysses and his oar,” Sarah said.

  “What, child?”

  Sarah felt abashed. “Just something from a book that Papa used to let us read,” she said. They fell into step down the street.

  Dathan smiled and rubbed his whiskery chin. “Your daddy was always a man for books. How’s he doing these days?”

  “All right,” she said. “This is his nap time.”

  “Nothing better for a man than a good nap, so I’m told, though I never could do it. I get restless this time of day.” He hefted his rake. “Too early to start planting, so I figured I’d come over and get the leaves off.”

  “Well, if napping is good for you, Papa should live to be a hundred,” she said. “He’s a man of steady habits. Fool around in the barn in the morning, down to the Temple of Community for lunch, then nap till dinnertime, and off to bed. On pretty days he goes up the hill to sit with Mama.”

  “We’re old people, honey. That’s our job—to remember the ones who go on ahead.”

  Sarah slowed her pace to match his, and as she did she remembered that Dathan had been a scary figure to her as a child, dark and silent, appearing from nowhere at the end of the war and joining the community as if by force of will. He had formed a bond with Mr. Turner, Newton’s father, but it was years before Sarah had gotten the nerve even to speak to him. The thought of her timidity made her smile.

  Dathan spoke again. “Your daddy has always been a man for deep thoughts. I’ll wager he’s probably thinking even while he’s asle
ep.”

  Sarah was unable to disguise the sadness that crossed her face. “Not anymore,” she said. “He’s getting addled.”

  “The great fear,” Dathan murmured.

  So it was, she supposed, although more for the near ones than the sufferer himself, it seemed. Her fading father spent his days placidly, with rare bursts of anger when he couldn’t recall a word or find his spectacles. She and Penelope were the ones who felt the growing dread, the full sense of loss, the monstrous unfairness of it all. “What did he do to deserve this, Mr. Dathan?” she burst out. “What on earth? Such a sweet and gentle man, and now he wets himself in his chair.”

  They stopped in the street. Dathan’s face took on a look of sadness so deep that Sarah could barely look into it. “I ain’t a preacher, child,” he said. “I can’t explain why things happen.” He sighed, leaning on his rake. “When I was younger, I used to ask the same question. Why was I born a slave? Why was I born black? What did I ever do to make people treat me like they do?” He squinted into the sun. “And then it came to me that I didn’t do nothing. Same with you and your daddy. There’s only two kinds of evil in this world, the things you do yourself and the things you allow to be done. And if you ain’t done anything, then there’s no ‘why’ to it, no deserving or not deserving. It’s just a gift from God.”

  “Some gift.”

  “Honey, some gifts look like burdens. If I hadn’t been a slave on this farm, I never would have met Cedeh.”

  “I’m glad you can see all the way to the blessings at the end of the trials. I’m afraid I don’t have that kind of vision.”

  Dathan shrugged as they started down the street again. “I ain’t too bright,” he said. “The good thing about being simple-minded, you just accept things as they happen and don’t see all the complications.”